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Dori Maynard,president of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education

Fault lines and demographics

The nation is split along five societal fault lines - race,
class, gender, generation and geography - and until
the media take them into account, coverage of community
and national issues will be possibly misleading and
potentially inaccurate.

"It's time for us to admit that those differences exist, to
begin to understand how those five fault lines shape ours
perceptions of ourselves, each other and events around us,"
said Dori J. Maynard, president of the Maynard Institute
for Journalism Education.

Maynard offered several examples in which ignorance
of the fault lines skews journalists' perceptions. At a Poynter
Institute seminar on race and the media, she said, the
group saw a clip of Ted Koppel interviewing white residents
of a Philadelphia neighborhood who objected to an
influx of black people.

"And they were very clear about why they didn't want
black people moving into their neighborhood," Maynard
said. "They said that happens, and crime skyrockets and
property prices plummet. So I'm watching this, and I'm
thinking, 'Wait a minute. There's no context.' And particularly
from my geography of Oakland, California, I keep
expecting Ted Koppel to say, 'With all due respect, there
are African-American neighborhoods in this country that
are safer and more affuent than white neighborhoods.'

"He never says that. I raised it as a concern, and the
conversation went in a different direction. But about five
minutes later, a white male participant raises his hand,
and he says he's concerned. He's concerned because there's
no context, and without context that clip made all white
people look as if they were racists.

"So there we were. We saw the exact same clip. We had
the exact same concern - that of context - but because of
our fault lines perception, what we meant by context was
completely different."

Lack of meaningful context prompted her father, the
late Robert C. Maynard, former owner and editor of the
Oakland Tribune, to develop a framework for coverage
called Fault Lines.

"Fault Lines was the last project that my father worked
on before he died," she said. "He came to it after years
spent covering what he called the social earthquakes of
the 1960s and '70s while he was at the The Washington Post
and then his years living with the physical earthquakes of
the Bay Area."

The Fault Lines framework urges people "to have conversations
with the goal of understanding each other and
not necessarily agreeing."

Maynard's discussions on diversity with journalists
throughout the industry have convinced her that such
conversations won't be easy.

"Everyone is frustrated with the conversation around diversity,
but they're all frustrated for different reasons," she
said. The industry's failure to meet hiring goals frustrates
journalists of color; white male executives are frustrated because
they don't get credit for the progress they have made.

"White men are frustrated because they've had years
of compliance training, diversity training and sensitivity
training," Maynard said. "They know what they can't say.
They have a set of learned responses for what they can say,
but they're terrified to speak their mind because they're
that afraid they're going to be branded racists, so no one's
talking in our newsrooms."

Add that to the other problems newsrooms are facing,
and "it's no wonder that we're not accurately reflecting our
communities," she said. "We don't have a way of talking
about it so we can get that coverage into the newsroom."

When her father broached the Fault Lines concept,
Maynard admitted, it took a while to sink in.

"Before I began working on Fault Lines, I had a friend
who honestly believed that Rodney King got what he deserved,"
she said. "We would have these screaming fights
about this.

"Then I began working on Fault Lines, and I realized
I'd better practice what I preach. So I sat down and really
tried to figure out why he thought the way he did. And
it turned out it really was a matter of fault lines. He was
slightly older than I was. He grew up where, from my perception,
there was this national myth that the police were
your friends. He grew up in an all-white suburb where not
only were the police his friends, when they were protecting
him, they were protecting him against people who looked
like me.

"I grew up in New York City in the '60s, when I think
there was ample evidence that the police were not the
friends of everybody," she said. Any doubts were erased
"when my father would come home from covering the civil
rights movement in the South and talk about being in
an all-white restaurant when the police were called. They
were not called to assert his right to eat there. They were
called to physically remove him.

"So we brought very different perceptions to that clip of
Rodney King. I never came to agree with him, but for the
first time I understood why the Simi Valley jury voted the
way they did. It was that kind of nuance and texture that I
wish had been in the coverage of that verdict."

She also wishes that coverage of the riots that followed
also had been nuanced.

"Instead what you saw was coverage that said, 'Oh look.
Here's an excuse for angry black people to steal sneakers,"
she said, adding that a colleague later did a content analysis
of riot coverage. "It turns out that that was an equal
opportunity riot. Everybody was up in that riot. So the
coverage was just inaccurate."

Maynard suggested that journalists use the Fault Line
framework in tandem with the traditional questions of
who, what, when, where, why and how. Make sure that
you really understand all the fault lines at work.

"Here's a place I think where the copy desk can play
such a key role," she said. "You can help us begin to make
sure that we're looking at the right fault line."

She cited early coverage of the 9/11 attacks in which
initial stories focused on religion, instead of the more likely
fault lines of geography and class.

"If our coverage is to make sense, we need to know what
fault line is at play," she said.

Maynard also recounted an incident during a magazine
writing class when a fellow student interviewed her
about class and African-American issues. What do you
think about the rapper Ice-T, Maynard was asked.

"Well, she was talking to my race, but my generation
answered," Maynard said. "I'm 45 years old, I don't have
any children, and I don't think about Ice-T. Ever. Under
any circumstances."

Copy desks also can make sure that reporters don't
"blur" fault lines. "One of my pet peeves is the way right
now we use geography to get at issues of race and class,"
she said, such as "in the inner city," which has become
shorthand for "poor and black" or "poor and Latino."

The flip side is "suburban," she said, which means
"white and middle class."

"I would urge you to urge your reporters to use extra
words," Maynard said. "Describe what they're trying to
say. Let the reader make their decisions."

As an example, she cited a newspaper where she gave a
Fault Lines workshop. She asked staffers to go out into the
streets and ask residents how the paper could do a better
job of covering their community, which had a large immigrant
population. The residents didn't speak in Fault Line
language, Maynard said, but they might as well have:

"What they were saying, essentially, is 'Stop using your
middle-class point of view to describe us. You keep calling
us poor. You see two families living in one house, sharing
one car, and you call us poor. Now we say we have a house
and we have a car. We are not poor.'"

Often the five fault lines come together to create blind
spots that don't necessarily reflect racism or sexism.

When the President Clinton-Monica Lewinsky story
broke, she heard the usual Washington, D.C., "talking
heads" - mostly white, middle-aged men - speaking of
moral outrage. That was not the reality in other parts of
the country. Many people outside the Beltway supported
Clinton. African-Americans supported Clinton. Women
continued to support Clinton. People who were living better
in a prospering economy supported Clinton. Yet when
midterm elections came up, the Beltway pundits continued
to say that the nation's moral outrage would bring
about a Republican sweep. Instead, she said, "Democrats
did just fine."

Journalists "took another hit to our credibility," she said.

"We need to have these conversations on all of these
aspects," Maynard said. "Otherwise we'll marginalize ourselves
out of business."